CWS5 "powers" nothing. The Fiery RIP is a black box that you can't see. The Fiery RIP has features built into it, specific to that Fiery RIP.

Your Fiery RIP is at Fiery System 10, but do be aware that that's just a starting point. Each vendor implements a different set of Fiery features, chosen from a Chinese menu of things that EFI offers. Don't be fooled into thinking that just because a Fiery is at EFI System 10 level that it has any given feature. (The same goes for System 9, etc.) Further, any vendor can choose to make different feature sets available to different systems, even though both Fierys use System 10 as the foundation.

Back to CWS5. Fiery Command Workstation is a window into what the Fiery RIP is doing, and it allows you to control those features on a job by job basis. CWS5 isn't the power behind the workflow. It simply lets you tap into the power.

If you have multiple Fierys in your shop, of different levels, you'll notice that Command Workstation gives you access only to the features available to the Fiery itself. If you see a feature in CWS on one system, you may or may not see the same feature when working on another system--even though you're using the very same installation of CWS. The individual Fiery controls what features you have, and CWS simply presents the features to the end user.

Command Workstation and Fiery system software are two distinct things, in general unrelated to one another.

And when you run CWS on a Fiery system itself, that's exactly--*exactly*--the same as running CWS on a remote computer. The Fiery system itself has no user interface, and requires a Windows or Macintosh computer on which to run the interface. That the interface may be running on the same Windows box that's also running the Fiery software, is incidental. Compare and contrast that to other systems--say, the Xerox FreeFlow Print Server or a Creo system--where the user interface is integral to and inseparable from the RIP software itself.